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Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

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Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#321
post #29

I have a degree in Studio Arts in addition to being a software developer (and recently I've started making a lot of creative work with AI). Back when I was in school, there was already plenty of debate about 'what is "Art"'? It's always been hotly contested. Most of my teachers felt that 'technique' was not Art. Others were more purists – life painters, etc – and felt that, no, technique is art. Duchamp poked the art…

> This is a really interesting debate – I just wish it scratched deeper than the surface more often than it does, with a bit more historical context.

I find this is true of a lot of topics, too bad there's not some way to shorten the time between shallow to more useful/informative debate. Your post above does that for this topic, thanks for that.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#322
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>were considered 'not artists' by a lot of people at the time. You make a good point that the trend of automating art is not a recent one. At some point I think a line in the sand must be drawn where the human artist is no longer the primary conceptualizer. Writing a text prompt is a fair place for that line to be drawn in my opinion.

> Writing a text prompt is a fair place for that line to be drawn in my opinion. I read an article[0] on the subject the other day. At some point it said that some art tools are inherently easy to use. Part of the difference between an amateur and an actual artist is in the mastery of such tool. Think of a phone camera for example. It's extremely easy to take more than decent pictures with it. But it takes a good pho…

What I think you miss is that mastery is really just a proxy value for what we really value.

Suppose I'm an artist, with something I feel I want to say, something I want to share with the world. How can I convince you to listen to me, when there's a thousand other people you could listen to? Especially about big issues like what's worthwhile in life.

Well, one way is commitment. Supposedly, Sophie Germain decided as a child to study mathematics because she read the story about Archimedes, who was so obsessed about his circles that he got killed over it. Clearly, Archimedes had found something that really mattered to him, and if Sophie studied it, maybe she would find that meaning too?

So likewise, as an artist I can convince you to take a look by being really dedicated, practicing the craftsmanship side of what I do so that no one can convincingly say they do it better. That doesn't guarantee that what I say is worthwhile to you, but it's at least an indication it was worthwhile to me.

But you know, the converse is not necessarily true. Someone who wasn't the best at the craft and who didn't sacrifice everything for the opportunity to reach you, could still have something wonderful to say.

Sometimes the skill at the craft limits what you're able to say, even if what you wanted to say was great, but I think that's rarely what matters. On a technical level, there's very little that distinguishes, say, the best guitarists in the world.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I agree. One of the big sources of income for online artists is commissions of D&D characters and such; AI-generated art is now getting good enough that people can get a "good-enough" version of what they want for free, instead of paying an artist $50 or $100 for a piece of art. I've commissioned art for my D&D character before, and I'll almost certainly do so again - but if I'm playing a one-shot onl…

People have been losing their jobs because of technology ever since the industrial revolution, each one of them enraged about it, and rightfully so. Society doesn't care about people who've put their whole lives into a skill that suddenly became worthless (or much less valuable then it was). The solution is not to ban technology (you can't really ban technology, as it's not under total government control) - the solut…

i mean what is even the point of pursuing a new skill if you can't create things anymore because the act of creation and craftsmanship have been so thoroughly devalued in favor of cheap volume? what kind of fucking joyless bugworld is that?

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#324
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth > "Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality" Your post is just a typical arts-based response. Not rigorous, sloppy, with "No doubt", "might suggest", "my impression is", "interpersonal challenges". It's just a sloppy mess that can't be engaged with, quite deliberately. Edit, if I sound frustrated I am. I'm trying to get a better handle on 'art' so I can und…

The problem is that it can take a long time to explain certain feelings or ideas you get from art (of any form), and even the attempt is a bit painful or downright impossible. A very low-level example would be a Jackson Pollock or Mondrian painting. It's just a bunch of... stuff but it's extremely visually pleasing compared to just random blotches. There are theories as to why that might be[0] but overall, it would b…

I don't have time to do this very good answer justice, I'm sorry. Let me try and be brief. Some people like Pollocks or Mondrians, some don't, and one thing I'm asking really is that people be honest and not pretend. Such honesty is a kind of rigour.

if we accept that certain kinds of art are liked by some people and not by others then questions have to be asked about what I some art is considered good generally (and goes in the gallery) and some isn't. To ask this question is also a kind of rigour.

Art I don't believe can be justified in any scientific sense, but I think the art may be judgeable in its own context, and I'm fine with that, provided we try. This too is a kind of rigour.

I perfectly understand the your fast inverse square root, or Euler's e/i/pi/-1 formuala are beautiful to some, they are not to you and me. Let's be careful with that, try and understand, and tolerate people's differences instead of saying "this is beautiful" and "this is not beautiful" (because that's an absolutist position). This is a kind of rigour.

I agree, scientific method is not appropriate, but something else is. Let's try to find it?

Anyway, that is an absolutely excellent answer and while it doesn't answer my questions, it does open up the hope that these questions can be answered or at least approached. For which, thank you!

Edit: somehow some just is bad, check out http://museumofbadart.org/collections/ I'd wear dark shades if I were you, some of this stuff blisters the eyes.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#325
post #6

It's going to be interesting to see how this is going to get enforced in the likely future in which AI art becomes in every way indistinguishable from human art.

until ai actually starts procedurally creating images with bespoke tools rather than blending pixels it will in fact be fairly easy to distinguish a made image from a generated one for the same reasons you can usually tell if someone painted over 3d or used a photo base. ai has a lot of dalle-isms and artifacts that i cannot see going away any time soon. on top of that you could simply require posted images to come with a process timelapse. heavypaint and a few other pieces of software already store those in the png data.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#326
post #162

I don't oppose AI-generated images in the slightest. I love them and I genuinely think they will be a very important part of our future. Effectively, it will take more effort to make a living as an artist, especially a mediocre one, because AI is now a decent mediocre artist. It's a stupendous artist for some prompts, too. However, I can understand that if I can just spit out image after image, there must be a way to…

the vast majority of participants in any given field are, by definition, mediocre.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are aware that disruption has been the human condition for 1000's of years, yes? So what? Slavery and The Plague and Cancer was part of the human condition too. And its wrong - technological disruption only appreared recently. For ten thousand years my ancestors lived nomadic lives on the eurasian plains, their lives were disrupted when a gun and a steam engine were invented few hundred years ago.

And now we don't die anymore because of simple infection or other preventable diseases. Many if not all of the things that keep us fed, warm and healthy today are only because we endured technological disruption.

So which is it, 'human condition includes disruption, there is nothing wrong with human conditions and therefore there is nothing wrong with disruption

or

'human condition sucks and the only way to fix it is with disruption'?

Are you just making it up as you go along? Do you feel the need to justify disruption at any cost?

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been losing their jobs because of technology ever since the industrial revolution, each one of them enraged about it, and rightfully so. Society doesn't care about people who've put their whole lives into a skill that suddenly became worthless (or much less valuable then it was). The solution is not to ban technology (you can't really ban technology, as it's not under total government control) - the solut…

i mean what is even the point of pursuing a new skill if you can't create things anymore because the act of creation and craftsmanship have been so thoroughly devalued in favor of cheap volume? what kind of fucking joyless bugworld is that?

Plenty of craftsman have good careers. We have a cabinet maker in town that is busy charging double the other cabinet makers. Those other cabinet makers charge double what a crew will install from Home Depot. All of them are busy.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#329
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe most of these models only use 1k images so they really can't make anything bigger yet. Maybe someday but not today. This is the sort of thing that changes incredibly quickly. I'd guess that a big chunk of the source data will be in 8K within a year or two.

Problem is the computing power necessary to implement those bigger models increases by some large value as well. An 81MP images is 81 times bigger than a 1MP image. Not sure exactly how the generation is implemented, but I am sure it probably becomes unaffordable if its linear.

It might require dedicated hardware. That only really becomes possible when you've proven the idea, but ASICs for cryptomining, TensorFlow, etc are quite real. There's no reason why dedicated hardware for training Stable Diffusion couldn't happen.

Re: Online art communities begin banning AI-generated images

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I paint a fair bit. Artists all know how hard it is to innovate, and how difficult it is to faithfully physically represent ideas, images, and emotions that they experience internally. People don't respect works created by algorithms because people feel algorithms (1) do not have a rich internal state, that is (2) challenging to express, (3) will one day die, and (4) never occur again. There's analogues in music. We…

> We have algorithms that can write jazz standards with all the same essential characteristics of Blue in Green, or So What, but no one cares. That's definitely not true. In the areas that make money with some semblance of reliability for the artists (low budget film / game scores esp. asset flippers, shitty TV shows, music for ads, etc), people are going to be more than happy with a magic "make music" button without…

That's a very good point, I hadn't thought of that part of the music industry. Thanks.
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